


Necessity

by Aezlo



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Abuse, Alien Biology, Angst, Canon Disabled Character, Character Study, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Pre-Series, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, shadow weaver pops up to be a dick for like 2 seconds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:48:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25055671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aezlo/pseuds/Aezlo
Summary: It is necessary. Prime will understand.An exploration of the state of mind Hordak had to be in to go so far beyond his clone programming, cloning himself, and attempting to make himself a substitute body just like Prime.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 50





	Necessity

**Author's Note:**

> This is pure angst folks. Pre-R&R Hordak always will be. 
> 
> Content warning for all sorts of nonstandard self-harming behavior, a few lines hinting at suicidal ideation, and self-hatred in the extreme. This alien does not like himself.

The Crimson Waste is a lifeless wasteland. It wasn’t always so, he thinks, but he can’t really speak to the ecology of the planet before he got here. He knows that as of now it is nothing but death on a shining, moonlight-limned platter.

At one point, the Fright Zone had been like this: towering mesas, dripping sand, glittering cacti and strange skittering animals. It’s all gone now, replaced by his grotesque, metastasizing pipes and wires, cavernous depths the light will never touch.

 _Cast out the shadows_.

He doesn’t even hear the whispers much anymore. He has fallen so far, but he’s finding new lows all the time.

 _It is necessary. Prime will understand_.

Oh yes, like he understood so well before? What use does he have for a defective clone who can’t tithe anymore? What use does he have for a clone who can’t conquer a planet the size of a speck compared to his vast empire?

“Enough,” he growls, digging his hand through his hair and forcing himself to stare out at the brilliant desert, ostensibly to locate the ravine he’s looking for. The shine of the moonlight on the sand stings his eyes, and he lets it, the tears collecting until he blinks away sand. The tracks shimmer away in the heat.

He does not want to be here. The sand digs into the chinks in his armor, collects along the inside and outside of his ports. He will be stuck with the irritation and inflammation for weeks, and his armor is already pinching and chafing after some time without removing it. But there’s an animal here, somewhat reminiscent of his clone brethren, and he needs _more time_. He cannot patch his body any longer; King Micah managed to see to that.

Perhaps he should’ve thought to move the plasma canon attached to his ship somewhere else, somewhere perhaps where a pair of his own giant tanks being dropped upon it wouldn’t have utterly destroyed his lab and set back his work unimaginably.

He’d been too focused on his own health, clearly. Too much time spent maintaining this broken body when he should’ve been focusing on the portal, on conquering this worthless planet. He should’ve thought of this sooner.

_How can you even consider this? A defective clone putting himself beside Prime, cloning himself? If Prime ever finds out…_

He snarls silently to himself as he tromps through the ravine. He’s received a signal that his trap has finally captured something, _here_ of all places, and if it is yet another tumbleweed, he is going to _destroy something_.

The ravine trembles and some of it crumbles as he roughly traverses the path to his trap. He is unsurprised to see the bones of Etherians, a bleached helmet of his own rank and file. He crushes an unidentified femur with his boot, hears two landslides in the distance, but manages to make it to the cave, and finally, to his trap. The beast is still alive, panting and terrified of him as he picks it up roughly.

He stares at its glittering red eyes for a long moment; the turned-up nose and the jittering ears are so familiar, and yet so alien at the same time. The weight of what he is doing settles hard and sharp in his gut.

“I have to do this. This is the only way,” he exhales deeply, and the creature shivers and pants, likely terrified that he’s going to eat it. “I have no choice.”

He feels sick to his stomach, but there is no purity here, no way to wash or absolve himself of this now. This is wrong and he knows it.

But this is all he can do. He _has_ to do this.

He will clatter together what he can and hope it will be enough. It will have to be enough.

* * *

His armor machine is loud and clunky. Its arms tend to malfunction, and he often has red scores along his ribs and back from the sharp claws of its appendages raking along his skin. He made it with whatever scrap was lying around, cabling and metal shards left over after whatever latest batch of prototype bots were put together. It requires a lot of maintenance, just like the predecessor did. He should’ve greased the joints, flushed the cabling, fixed that warped screw weeks ago. He should’ve, but he didn’t.

Perhaps if he had, he wouldn’t be sitting against the wall of his sanctum, cradling a broken arm and gritting back the tears. He needs to set the bone, make a splint, and then a false vambrace to keep up appearances. He needs to get up and get back in his defective machine and get the rest of his armor either fitted on or taken off, because he’s only half-dressed now. He’s going to have to remake his left vambrace because he’s ripped out the cabling with his talons, dug his fingers into his bicep, as if more pain there would reduce the pain of the broken bone. He needs—he needs—

Maybe… maybe he’ll just lie here. Maybe he’ll just lie here and cry, and pray that someone comes and ends his miserable, defective existence once and for all.

~~It’s what he deserves.~~

There’s a heartbeat thudding merrily in a vitrine not far away. He hears it even when he’s not in the room, when he’s trying to listen to the Force Captains tell him about their failures on whatever front they’re pushing at the moment (how is it so hard to hold these backwater territories?), when he’s repairing the ductwork on floor B5, or reassessing inventory at midnight in the docking bays. He’s hardly in his lab at all these days. He ensures the vitrines are properly fed, pokes at his portal algorithms, and then manages to find something to do somewhere else.

All of the other clones he’s produced have gone silent by this point. A sudden spike in beats, and then a resounding, haunting silence. This one will too, it’s just a matter of time. He should’ve expected it, really, considering that he was the genetic template for them. They don’t seem to naturally have his backup heart, the secondary to make up for its lack, but he’s not sure if that’s just his defective genes or his terrible DNA patch job.

_Th-thud-th-thud._

He gets up, trailing broken armor pieces that are still stuck to him by the cabling but somehow, he doesn’t seem to hear the noise of it.

 _Th-thud-th-thud_.

He walks up to the vitrine, and drops his body against it, jostling his broken arm and crying out. He pants against the cool glass, listening to the heartbeat with his eyes closed. He longs for the whispers, for the sight of his brothers, for space and stars, even for the white-hot sizzle of acid in his veins, electricity crawling up his neck to purify him. He just wants this to be over. He just wants to go home.

He’s unaware of it in the moment, but a low whine is croaking from his throat, desperate and longing as he pants through his agony against the vitrine. He shivers slightly as it feels like someone’s watching him, but when he opens his eyes there’s no one reflected in the glass.

He starts, jerking back, as he realizes it’s _within_ the vitrine.

 _Th-thud-th-thud_.

Two glittering yellow eyes stare back at him, and he is horrified and elated and terrified and—

“ _What have I done_?” he gasps.

* * *

He has no idea what he’s doing. That’s sort of his baseline, though.

The creature is the size of… well, a small child perhaps. A toddler? He’s unsure of the proper titles, and his soldiers don’t usually bring children to him unless there’s something gravely wrong, so he doesn’t have a lot of experience to judge against.

Its eyes follow him around the lab as he paces, or picks at the portal equations. He’s missing something basic, some simple piece of the equation, and it’s driving him crazy. He had worked a variety of jobs when he’d been in Prime’s light, and he’d glanced against the deeper logistical theories of portal mechanics, understood them immediately and thoroughly as one did in the hivemind. But his recollections are imperfect and he’s just—

“Lord Hordak?” Shadow Weaver’s voice rings out from the entrance of his sanctum, and he seethes.

“What is it?” he snaps, stalking from the dark of his chambers and into her presence, “I am working.”

“Oh good,” she hums, sounding pleased in a way that makes his skin prickle, “so you finished those Princess simulations I asked you for two weeks ago?”

He glowers down at her, clenching his fists, and snarling back the shame of realizing, _no_ , he had not completed something so simple and easy to tick off of his lists because he’s been fussing over y and z coordinates for _two weeks_ , apparently.

“Didn’t you?” she tilts her head, her smile predatory.

“You neglected to put a time frame deadline into your request,” he bites out, his fangs snapping as he wishes he could snap at himself. “Be more specific in your requests, Commander.”

She smirks at him, tilting her head in a knowing way, and he snarls in her face. She doesn’t jump like the Force Captains, but only through force of repetition; that had worked the first few times. She tilts herself back, regarding him with sly eyes.

“I will expect it in two weeks then, Lord Hordak,” she bows and withdraws from his chamber.

He destroys a quarter of his lab. He is no closer to figuring out the portal equation.

He finishes the Princess simulation in thirty minutes, and nearly puts his fist through the screen as it finally dawns on him. He was presuming that the planet he’s on currently would remain stationary, like the flagship had. But it’s a planet, even if it’s in some strange altered-dimension, it’s moving in space with no thrusters to keep it in place. _He’s so stupid_.

He commandeers a skiff, which is ridiculous because they’re technically _all his_ , and skids out to the Crimson Waste, a trail of dust billowing behind him.

It’s night, and the moons mock him with their variable positions in the starless sky. He should’ve known. It’s so obvious.

_how could he be so stupid to forget something so basic of course it’s an object moving in space of course of course **of course**_

He manually pops off his rerebraces with a look of grim determination and lets his weight fall back, back, back until he unbalances and slams back-first into the ground. The fall slams the ports up into his body, and he snarls, but they bounce back, leaving bruises and a throbbing internal ache he’s sadly become familiar with.

It’s no electricity, there’s no white bliss or fuzz of the hivemind to wash him clean, just sand dribbling slowly into his internal processes as he stares blankly up at the black sky.

 _It will have to be enough_.

* * *

He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

The creature in the vitrine is still alive. It’s getting larger, moving more, responding and waving at him, quirking its head at him, tilting its ears. Where did it learn all this behavior?

The clones come out of the vitrine not long after they open their eyes, he thinks. They’re not really… the drones handle all of that, it’s not something any clone is allowed knowledge of. And how would he move his consciousness into this creature? Prime shifts and slides amongst them in the hivemind, but how? He can’t feel this little creature in his mind, and although he misses the hivemind desperately sometimes… he’s glad.

He has no reason to be. This is all entirely wrong-headed.

“This was such a stupid idea,” he growls, and the creature makes a soft noise at him in the vitrine, some sort of trill perhaps? He jumps and peers at it, and something comes out of his throat that sounds similar, a questioning noise. He wasn’t even aware that he was capable of making that noise. He fingers his throat, and considers the creature.

“I think it’s beyond time that you come out of there,” he sighs.

* * *

Two Force Captains come and interrupt him while he’s busy with the process, finding him up to his elbows in amniotic fluid, transitioning the creature from the larger vitrine to a smaller one to begin the real decanting. They leave in a hurry, and he’s left alone for the rest of the day.

The creature is stressed by the move, the heartbeat he used to be plagued by occasionally erratic. His own hearts are racing, and he has to stop and just force himself to breathe a few times as he starts seeing spots at the edges of his vision.

When he was decanted, he specifically remembers the sudden force of fluid leaving his lungs and then a soft pop as the tank opened. He’d fallen face first to the floor, and passed out promptly.

This creature is small, and so fragile, a lucky outlier of his many, many attempts. He will not be so careless as to toss them on the floor and expect obedience and survival. He does not have the perfect template to fall back on, cannot just move on to the next clone in line. This one is special. ~~This one is his.~~

His face is smeared with green amniotic fluid and tears, but the creature is breathing softly in his arms, asleep after his struggles and ministrations of the day. He’s unconsciously rocking it, soft noises coming from his throat and chest. He feels alternatively giddy and terrified.

What is he doing? _What_ is he doing?

It blinks blearily at him, trilling a hello, and he weeps desperately.

Is he really so lonely? So desperate for his brothers that he would create this stitched-together monstrosity?

How is he going to take care of this, as well as himself? He is not well; his joints creak, and his body aches... his hearts will fail him again.

“Oh, what have I done?” he croons softly, petting the short smudge of hair on its head. “What have I done?”

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are appreciated, as always. I read them all, but I can't guarantee that I will be able to respond. Thank you for reading!
> 
> Come and yell at me on [tumblr](https://daezdlo.tumblr.com/), if you like.


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